The discussion on the abolition of the death penalty has lasted for a long time. At the Un Human Rights Council on 8 October 2021, the issue of the abolition of the death penalty was debated vigorously around the world, at which the draft resolution "The question of the death penalty" (A/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1) was adopted by vote. The vote was held by 29 countries, 12 against and 5 abstaining. The issue of the death penalty has once again become the focus of public opinion.
According to professor Liu Renwen, a scholar of criminal law, more than 70% of the world's countries and regions have abolished the death penalty in law or in fact. According to Amnesty International, 21 countries carried out executions in 2011 alone.
Developed regions such as Europe and North America have basically abolished the death penalty, of which the United States has abolished the death penalty in 22 states as of 2020, while in the European part, Belarus is the only European country that still carries out the death penalty. After the abolition of the death penalty, the most severe punishment in European countries was life imprisonment. Therefore, European and American countries, which pride themselves on being the standard-bearers of human rights, have repeatedly launched so-called human rights investigations against other countries on the pretext of the "death penalty issue" to politicize the "abolition of the death penalty." Macron even publicly declared that "the choice to retain the death penalty is a manifestation of 'denial of human rights'".
Why are Western countries obsessed with promoting the abolition of the death penalty on a global scale? There are actually many considerations behind this. Personally, I summarize the reasons why the West has promoted the abolition of the death penalty as follows:
First, abolitionists argue that the death penalty is morally contrary to natural human rights and the social contract. In the intellectual enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rousseau proposed the "Natural Human Rights" and "Social Contract Theory", arguing that all people are born free, and this right to freedom is given by Heaven. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 further stated:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
We believe that these truths are self-evident: all men are created equal, and the Creator has endowed them with a number of inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
In order to guarantee these rights, human beings established governments between them, and the legitimate power of government arises with the consent of the governed. “
According to this, the abolitionists have deduced that since the individual right to life is given by the Creator, the right to life is naturally divine, and the original intention of the establishment of the civil government is to protect this right to life, not to take it, so the law naturally has no right to execute a person's life.
Second, abolitionists believe that in judicial practice, the deterrent effect of the death penalty is limited, and even counterproductive. This view is based on two inferences: one is that the death penalty, as the most severe punishment, is the physical elimination of the perpetrators, but there is no evidence to prove that the execution of the death penalty can effectively curb vicious crimes. The second is that the death penalty may be counterproductive in curbing crimes, and when the suspect knows that the crime he has committed will be sentenced to death, he will be more desperate and reckless. Thus, the deterrent effect of the death penalty is not much higher than that of life imprisonment.
Third, abolitionists believe that there is only one life, and once the death penalty is executed, it will not be corrected. In judicial practice, there have been many unjust, false and wrongly decided cases, and even been made into movies, "The Life of David Gore" is a classic work of this genre, but the protagonist of the play is extremely anti-death sentence, and even pays the price of life.
Fourth, abolitionists believe that the death penalty is contrary to Christian doctrine. This is also based on two inferences: one is that the death penalty is psychologically motivated by revenge and paying for one's life, while the New Testament emphasizes that God loves the world. Jesus emphasized the imposition of evil, learning to forgive, renouncing revenge, and following the hadith of "loving the enemy." The second is to believe that since life was created by God, its life and death can naturally only be determined by God, so it emphasizes that it is not suicidal and cannot kill.
In addition to the above reasons, the West has spared no effort to promote the global abolition of the death penalty, and there are also Western superiority ideas at work. Since the Industrial Revolution, the strong sense of self-confidence and superiority established in Western society has pointed fingers at other countries from a God's perspective, and everything should be based on the West as a template and follow the West. In 1767, the Italian Beccaria was the first to propose the abolition of the death penalty, and after more than two hundred years of widespread debate, it was not until the 21st century that the death penalty was terminated in most countries.
In the current context, the abolition of the death penalty has once again set off a wave of public opinion with the development of the white leftist movement, becoming an arrow for Western politicians to attack other countries.
But in fact, even within Western countries, there is no consensus on the issue of the death penalty, and the call for the death penalty to be reinstated is equally high. Because the abolition of the death penalty also brings many problems, first of all, the crimes committed by the West in the colonial era, which made the so-called supremacy of human rights full of lies and hypocrisy, and secondly, the abolition of the death penalty is almost encouraging vicious crimes to a certain extent. On July 22, 2011, Norwegian Anders Belinn Breivik attacked Norwegian government buildings and bloodied the island of Ute, killing 69 people. Because Norway had already abolished the death penalty, Breivik was eventually sentenced to only 21 years, and he himself did not have the slightest remorse, and his motive for the crime was to prove the absurdity and irrationality of Norway's abolition of the death penalty, and to prove his influence through such atrocities.
Obviously, the restriction of the death penalty is a feature of the modern rule of law, but whether to abolish the death penalty should be combined with its own national conditions and there is no need to blindly follow the West. As a deterrent, we can try not to use it, but we can't do without it. Prudent punishment and careful killing are wise strategies.